But when he heard a comment on the radio this morning that the Labour Party is clearly going backwards, because it had achieved a lesser swing in this by-election than in Barnsley Central, Chubby Cat pricked up his furry little ears. For two reasons; firstly that Barnsley Central was the last by-election but two (so the interviewee in question was clearly being selective) and secondly because of the sheer bonkersness of relying on 'swing' as a measure of very much at all in a by-election like this.
It is testament to the influence of the late, great Robert McKenzie, inventor of the swingometer, that we still use this concept. It has its uses, but it was invented in the days when 95% of the votes in Parliamentary elections were cast for two parties, Conservative or Labour, so it made more sense to think of elections as a battleground in which one party won support from the other. Nowadays, across the UK, around a third of votes are cast for other parties, so the pendulum is now one that swings in circles rather than just to and fro. At the very least, you have to calculate more than one swing figure for each contest to see what it is going on.
For by-elections, which invariably come with a much poorer turnout than General Elections, it makes more sense to look at who it was who decided not to vote.
In Feltham & Heston, over 25,000 people who voted in 2010 decided not to bother in the by-election, a 52% remarkable reduction in the number of votes cast, broken down as follows;
| Conservative | -10080 | -61.0% |
| Labour | -8535 | -40.3% |
| Lib Dems | -5315 | -79.6% |
| BNP | -1174 | -68.5% |
| Novelty & local (*) | -632 | -74.1% |
| Green | -104 | -19.6% |
| Workers Revolutionary | -78 | -100.0% |
| UKIP | 284 | 28.6% |
| English Democrat | 322 |
(*) 'Novelty & Local' is Chubby Cat's collective term for all those parties that don't really count at a national level.
The Conservatives lost the largest number of votes, over 10,000 or 61% of their votes, while the Lib Dems fared even worse, losing nearly 80% of their 2010 poll. Labour lost 40%, which is less than the 52% overall reduction in votes cast, hence the increase in its share of the vote, but only an irrespressible optimist would call it good. A pattern since the 2010 General Election has been that all three main parties have lost votes in each of the by-elections, apart from Oldham & Saddleworth, which arguably doesn't count because the 2010 result was declared void. Only UKIP regularly increases not just its share of the vote, but also its ACTUAL number of votes.
Of course, all of this is great fun, and utterly meaningless, but it confirms the general trend provided by polling that none of the three main parties is in particularly good odour with voters at the moment. The next General Election is likely to be won by the people we dislike least on the day.
